Code of Personal Status (Tunisia) - Conservative Reaction

Conservative Reaction

In this context, presidential feminism remains ambiguous, as is illustrated by the speech delivered during the UNFT's third congress, held between December 20–29, 1962, in which he declared that he had to protect the family and guarantee to man the faculty of being its head. The policy of Bourguiba lost its vitality in the 1970s.This absence of new reforms can be explained in different ways: the deterioration of the president's health, the delayed reaction of conservatives remaining reserved in the course of preceding decades and the resistance of society shaken to its foundations. At the same time, power desired the destabilization of the Marxist left and encouraged the founding of the Association for the Preservation of the Koran in January 1968 which contributed to the birth of the Islamist party Ennahda.

Also, the silence of the Code concerning marriage between a Muslim woman and a non Muslim man, since 1969, is interpreted by most judges as a recognition of the prohibition decreed by Muslim law in the matter. This reasoning was approved on November 5, 1973 by a circular of the minister of justice who to, "stay away from the negative sides of the West," prohibited marriages between Muslims and non Muslims and who judged void marriages in which the non Muslim husband had not converted to Islam and where a certificate of conversion was not provided. Courts during this period often interpreted the Code in a restrictive manner, refusing, for example, all right of inheritance for non Muslim women in religiously mixed marriages. Bourguiba himself yielded to the conservatives' wishes and in 1974 refused the pressure of his entourage and the majority of his government wanting to modify the law concerning equality in succession, which had instituted the equality of the sexes in relation to inheritance. Indeed, on this issue he could not refer to the Koran to justify himself, as the text is clear: "To sons, a part equal to that of two daughters." In 1976, at the UNFT's sixth congress, he openly declared that: "It is not necessary that woman exercise remunerative activities outside her home. He seems to renounce one of the principles of his modernization policy.

The 1980s are characterized in the same line through an immobility in terms of feminist reforms, with the exception of some advances not negotiable at the beginning of the decade: law no. 81-7 of February 18, 1981 entrusting to the widow mother the upbringing of minor children and favouring women in divorce cases. Moreover, on November 1, 1983, Bourguiba named two women ministers, Fathia Mzali to the Ministry of the family and of the Advancement of Women and Souad Yaacoubi to Public Health.